there we wander, there we weep
by gidget89
Summary: She would not forgive him.


_**there we wander, there we weep;**_

Eleven hundred years, all of time and space – he's picked up more than a few ghosts along the path. Lives he's taken, lives he's left broken behind him – never looking back. He mustn't look back.

That way lies only madness.

He is haunted. And it usually takes them a while to see it. Some of them never even notice at all. And a few – a very select few – see all too much. But no one sees all of his ghosts the way that she does.

_x_

Forgiveness was a foreign currency to her mind, her heart, her soul. She was a weapon, barely even a person, though she'd managed to fool herself long enough for a brief shining moment. She wasn't human. And she wasn't timelord either – so what, exactly, was she?

Not one, and not the other, she existed in the spaces between. The vast nothingness, a gaping wound between what she ought to be and what she was told to be. She was nothing at all.

There were holes in her memory, a constant sense of presque vu – she could feel it all in her head, just out of reach. She barely remembered growing up, barely remembered her existence outside of being Amy and Rory's best friend – what had she been when they weren't with her?

She can't remember. All she knew were stories that had tripped off of Mels' tongue with ease, as if they'd been practiced. And she was sure they had. She has no memory of actually stealing a bus, no memory of a home life back then, outside of Amy's house and school. Where had she lived? What had she done?

She doesn't remember. She doesn't _want_ to remember.

In her darkest nights she curled around textbooks and searching all of history for the one man who might tell her – explain to her just what she was. He'd not looked at her like she was nothing. He'd looked at her like she was more than something. Like she was _everything_.

She searched for him like it was her sole mission in life. Because she was empty, a void and an aberration – something that should never have existed in the first place and she needed him to help her. To save her from herself.

It was a futile attempt she knew. He would find her when he would, and what did any of this seeking do for her? She read accounts of him, some glowing, some lost and broken and left behind – she traced his path through time and space with a hand that shook and a sense of knowing.

She felt like she knew him, her head filled with stories after stories, fairytales and horrors, monsters and demons. She decided she liked the horror stories best. She liked the darkness that lined his tales; she liked knowing that he could do terrible things and still strive for beauty within the chaos of the universe.

If she fell in love, she fell in love with the worst of him first.

_x_

Some days he felt he had no brightness within the confines of his soul at all. That was always the purpose of them – his friends. His companions. Those he'd loved because they were so very human, and so very bright.

He used them like tools to combat his own darkness. But eventually they were with him too long. They stood next to him in the darkness too long, and they dimmed. Just a bit. Just enough that one day he would look at them all and see the shadows creeping across their eyes. Eyes that saw too much. Too much pain. Too much darkness. Too many losses and not enough wins and more sacrifices than he could ever count.

And he'd know.

He had to leave, had to save them from himself. The lonely madman trying to outrun his own sins by saving everyone else.

So he would leave them.

With her it wasn't that she was so bright she held back all his dark. It was that she was so shadowed already; she slipped into the darkness with him and simply stood by his side.

She was never frightened by the dark; she was never bright enough that he would fear for her light. She just melted into the shadows of his soul until he could no longer see where he ended and she began.

And he loved her all the more for it.

_x_

She was selfish, and she knew it. She just didn't _care_.

The world existed – in a way – and it would for a long long time with him in it. He'd shouted at her – millions upon millions would suffer and die – and she stared back at him, unaffected. It was a pointless argument and he knew it. Millions upon millions would suffer and die in _any_ given universe. This one, the next one, alternate ones. It was humanity's gift to the cosmos.

Suffering.

Even if she killed him, even if she became the nothingness that Kovarian wanted her to be, did he honestly think no suffering would occur in a universe without him? Did he expect her to believe that no suffering had occurred in the universe while he'd been in it?

People suffered. People died. Sometimes even at his hands.

He was asking her to exchange her own visceral pain to save the imagined and inevitable suffering of millions.

She refused.

She was not a good person and she knew that. She could never aspire to see the universe as something to hope for as he could. But she could save him, and by doing that she could save his vision for a better universe. Even one that was happening all at one time.

So she didn't flinch when he called her an embarrassment, because she knew in her hearts – he was just as selfish as she was. And if he had to compress time to save the universe, he would.

He just never understood that she never had any designs on saving the universe.

She only wanted to save him.

Same difference, really.

_x_

No one haunted him more than her.

Her life, her death, her love – it permeated every atom of his existence until she was everywhere. And he loved it. He selfishly loved knowing that he could not kill her, because he already had. He loved that he could not ruin her, because she'd already been ruined at his hand.

She was tailored for him, and he was nothing if not a god filled with vengeance and remorse. He loved that darkness within her. He loved that she refused to bow to him, refused to put anything else above him. He was vain, and that kind of love was irresistible.

So he forgave her.

He forgave her her darkness in order to justify his own pardoned existence.

She was not the best of him, and so he never loved her in the way he had his friends. Innocent and pure, untouched and unrequited and from afar.

No, she was the worst of him, reflected for himself to see. The worst of his failures and the worst of his fears.

And he loved her anyway. Accepted everything within her that he struggled with in himself. It was a powerful love, a love that forgave all transgressions, a love that was selfish and didn't care for anyone outside of her.

He forgave her things he would never forgive himself of.

And the best part wasn't that she forgave him too. The best part was that she lay beside him in the dark and whispered into his mind with her hands on his brow and her voice in his head – she would not forgive him his transgressions.

She would not forgive him.

She saw nothing to forgive.


End file.
